


The Inbetween

by Sedatephobia



Category: Undertale (Video Game), Undertale AU - Fandom
Genre: Accidents, Darkness, Explanations, Kidnapping, Other, Sentient void, The Void, hunger, introspective, thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 07:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7350889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sedatephobia/pseuds/Sedatephobia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The impossible is possible, the nonexistence exists.<br/>How would it feel to be a complete paradox?<br/>Your entire being, the fact that you are shouldn't happen.<br/>And yet, here you are. The would passes by without you. <br/>Once friends and family forget your memory.<br/>How does it feel to have a nonexistence?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Inbetween

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gasterfile](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Gasterfile).



> This was fun, if not hard to write!  
> Another Voidby fic! 
> 
> Voidby is the brainchild of Gasterfile on tumblr, please go check out his blog.  
> It's full of gorgeous SFW and NSFW art.

Have you ever wondered about how powerful nothingness is? Ever pondered the immense expanse of the Inbetween? It’s impossible. How can you imagine something that doesn’t exist and yet is all around you? The nth dimension. It is inanimate and yet sentient. It thinks. It breathes. It desires. 

The void needs someone to look after it. For it is a helpless creature and yet, immensely powerful. It has influence over all things, if very slight. Driven by primal need, it reaches out invisible tendrils to tug at the strings of time, fate, happenstance to achieve its goal. 

Nothingness is hard to describe. It is not black, white, any color, smell or flavor. It’s the absence of these things. It hurts to think about. It should not be possible, it should not be able to even be thought of. It should not even be a comprehensible possibility. Nothingness defies all possibilities. It exists above rationality. 

The Inbetween needs a caretaker, it gets lonely. As powerful as the nothingness is, it cannot interact with the world as it pleases. So it creates an avatar for itself. It is not a god, it cannot create something from nothing. It, instead, chooses a being from the true world to become its unwilling captive.

It took a millennium for the nonexistence to choose a proper avatar. To it, time doesn’t matter. It permeates the flow of time. This moment and a thousand moments in the future are filled with the entire void. There is no pocket of existence for the void. It is the absence of existence. The absence of time. The absence of being. The avatar of the void is a paradox. Its existence means the void exists, which is not true. The avatar is a singularity that proves that the Inbetween truly, actually is there. 

~*~*~

The expanse settled, finally settled on the perfect avatar. He was everything it wasn’t. He had meaning and truth. It didn’t; the void existed only to exist. It had no purpose, no meaning. He had warmth and a driving force. It didn’t; nothingness is cold and unchangeable. It is always the same.

It was proud of itself. It found something perfect. Tainted, but still pure. Except he was clueless. The Inbetween had revealed itself in the only way it could. Controlled chaos. Making things happen that weren’t supposed to happen. As the avatar experimented the nothingness made impossible things happen. Chemicals didn’t mix right. Water wasn’t polar. Fire burning wasn’t a chemical reaction, it could be undone. 

The shifting, breathing, undulating expanse was noticed, finally. After years and years of subtly altering the avatar to its nonexistence. It was noticed. It rejoiced. It sighed. It was hungry. So, so hungry. It was trapped without time. Even while it fed, it starved. It did not know anything else. While sentient, while it could thing, the creature was very primitive. A child. It knew hunger and it knew want. It was intelligent enough to feel primitive emotions. Need, pleasure, unhappiness. It’s existence or lack of, was a sad one. 

The scientist was curious. He had been doing the same experiment weeks in a row. Each day he would set it up. And each time he would get a different reaction. It was never the same. Except one thing. Each result would have a single drop of what appeared to be black tar. Except it wasn’t. Tar wasn’t this dark. Tar shimmered and had reflections. This new substance seemed to absorb all light. The avatar started collecting the samples of void and began running tests. 

The readouts were astounding. They intrigued the expert. There was power to be had here. Even the small drop that was left after the corrupted interactions was enough to power the entire lab for a day. And he could produce multitudes. The King and Queen were invited to share in the results. They were ecstatic. They knew exactly where their employee was going with this. Given enough time, he could amass enough of the dark material, the pieces of void, to create enough energy for them to overpower, or short out the barrier. 

However, the monster, being a true scientist, wanted to figure out exactly what was causing the impossible interactions. His curiosity made him careless. His carelessness was his downfall, in the end. Or rather, it was the catalyst. It was really the Inbetween’s fault. It plucked at fate’s strings causing the precise chain of events to happen in an exact order. 

The scientist wasn’t supposed to work that day, it was a monster holiday. He had blown off his friend’s gathering to go into the lab and run just one experiment. Just one, he told himself. It was harmless and the other monster would understand. One test turned into two. Two turned into four. By the time he realized he had missed the gathering entirely there were at least thirty experiments running simultaneously. He was the only one in the lab that day. All the assistants and interns were at home or with their own friends and family, enjoying the day off. 

The bartender who was was holding the missed gathering was a bit miffed with his experimenter friend. He decided to pay him a little visit and drag the sorry sack out for a drink. It was all perfectly planned. Perfectly executed. The nonexistence was a masterful manipulator. It made all the player’s decisions for them and made it seem like it was internal. It was the void who made the scientist ignore the gathering, it was the Inbetween who made the bartender decide to go pay his friend a visit. It was the nonexistence that removed an entire being from existence. Just cut all threads tying it to the true world.   
As soon as the bartender opened the lab door, the scientist jumped, whipping his head towards the sudden sound, knocking the flask of collected dark matter onto himself. The void latched onto the being, digging it’s nonexistent claws into the very fiber of the academic's existence. The pain was beyond description. It was not burning or stabbing or even ripping. It was deeper than his soul. It hurt in a way that opened his mind, flayed it raw to new knowledge and new existences. 

As the scientist battled the absolute agony of an innumerable new thoughts, feelings, memories he lost control. His power, magnified by the hunger of the void, arched out in a massive blast that sent the well-meaning companion into a machine, causing the first of many injuries that would culminate. As the avatar awoke to the void’s existence, his power grew wilder, darker, deadlier as it was intertwined with the dark desires of nothingness. 

He watched as his magic was pulled out from his soul and slowly devoured. A soul was not meant to have this happen. The sudden unplanned emptiness was enough for the glass-like container to fracture and split apart, remnants of magic and a single dark strand of denial keeping it from splitting completely and killing its host. As the corrupted lashed out at the barkeeper one last time, knocking him unconscious the scientist disappeared with a loud silence. 

The void sighed in relief as it continued to slowly feed on the ever replenishing magic if it’s newly captured avatar. The body of the reluctant being had been changed as well, molecules and matter rearranged into something that could better contain the fractured soul and exist within the dark, vast expanse.


End file.
